A better story than Bandersnatch!
Posts by DailyLlama
202 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2016
BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!
Bosses face losing 'key' workers after forcing a return to office
I genuinely don't mind being in the office, it's just the complete waste of time and effort of sitting in traffic for an hour before and after work that bothers me.
When I WFH, I don't have to get up until 8:45, and when I finish at 6, I am already at home, and ready to cook a proper dinner. At lunchtime I can get on my exercise bike and knock out a quick 10km, have a shower and a sandwich and get back to work within the hour.
I can't do any of that in the office, and I can't not take the lunch hour to leave early, so I sit and read a book, as it's a lot safer than wandering the mean streets of Uxbridge.
Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget
Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun
Re: I need my local printer
We had a user who complained that her local printer (on the desk opposite hers) was too far away, and she'd hurt her back stretching to get printouts from it. So Health and Safety asked me to have a look at it (knowing that I was a curmudgeon)... I duly went to the office, inspected the printer and the layout of the office, and noting that there was a huge networked MFD in the same room, I removed the local printer so that she would have to stand up and walk to the other one, thus preventing her injuring herself further.
Student requested access to research data. And waited. And waited. And then hacked to get root
Re: In Code We Trust
Yep, I used it when I was at a site migrating PCs from the old company domain to our one (having purchased their company) and realised after the first reboot that I'd forgotten to change the local admin account password, and therefore couldn't log on to join to the new domain...
EU mandated messaging platform love-in is easier said than done: Cambridge boffins
Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss
New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong
'What's the point of me being in my office, just because they want to see me in the office?'
Re: Contract clauses
My "office hours" have not changed while I've been working from home. My work laptop lives in my spare bedroom/office, and does not come out of there unless I'm going to the physical office building.
I do not go into that room before 9am, or after 6pm. Those are my contracted hours, I do not get paid overtime, thus no overtime happens.
UK comms regulator rings death knell for fax machines
PC component scavenging queue jumper pulled into line with a screensaver
I did exactly the same
to a colleague who had been to watch Man Utd lose the Champions League final to Barcelona.
I got approval from our manager first, and he was just as big a joker as me, so happily went for it.
He eventually asked me how to get rid of it after seeing the grinning Barcelona team as his wallpaper for two weeks.
BOFH: You want presentation layer, but we're physical layer
Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C8H10N4O2
Java installation
I arrived at work one morning to be greeted with the news that "someone tried to install Java on one of the MFD printers, and it didn't work".
As I was pre-coffee myself, it took me a while to work out what they meant. When I got upstairs, I found that someone had put a pint of freshly brewed coffee on the sorter unit of the MFD (cost ~£20,000), and proceeded to print out their days instruction booklets. Whereupon the sorted had duly started moving up and and down rapidly, and spilled the pint of coffee into the printer.
Fortunately this user was only a partial idiot, and had turned the printer off to prevent anything too bad from happening... so I separated all the parts I could, and we dried as much as we could with paper towels, and then I raised a ticket with our printe management company. Who turned up a couple of hours later, and miraculously, nothing had gotten inside it.
It did smell nice for a couple of weeks though!
Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'
In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up
Mouse hiding in cable tray cheesed off its bemused user
We used to do this...
When wireless mice first came out. Except they only had two channels, so if more than two people were using them, everyone's equipment quickly becamse useless.
And for a joke, when you were bored, you'd just change the channel on your mouse and move it around a lot and wait for the cries of surprise and annoyance from your colleagues.
Even better were the keyboards. Change the channel, and type something like "This is IT, your account has been suspended for watching too much porn"
'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead
We had a complete technophobe of a marketing director, back in around 2002, who never used his computer. He'd always come to us to dictate emails (despite none of us being secretaries), and when we asked him why, he complained that his computer was really old and slow. And to be fair, it was the last 486 in the building, so we ordered him a shiny new Pentium 3.
When it arrived, I took out his old computer, and he took the opportunity to rearrange his office a bit. Meaning that the new computer was now too far from the network port, and I needed to get a new cable. We didn't have any of the right length in stock, so I ordered some new ones, and told him that I'd be back to install the cable in the next couple of days.
Things happened, there was a weekend, and it was 6 weeks before he came back to me to say that his new computer didn't work... SIX WEEKS!
Reg readers tell us what they wanted for SysAdmin Appreciation Day
Microsoft warns Windows 10 patch broke printing for some
A character catastrophe for a joker working his last day

The company I worked for acquired another smaller company, and after a few months closed them down, making everyone redundant.
When we turned up at the site to start collecting all the equipment up, one of the senior senior managers noticed a flashing light on a label printer, and asked someone what it meant. "Probably a paused print job", came the reply. So he pressed the button next to it, releasing a job of 5,000 labels saying "<company name> are c@nts!"
Highly amusing for everyone except the manager...
We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything
This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

It's happened to me a few times...
I was in my office one day circa 2001, and "someone" came in and put a Zip disk (remember them?) into the drive of a computer used by someone who wasn't in that day. Then went back to their own desk.
Then I noticed the activity light flashing a lot, and being a nosy bugger (and not trusting this person a jot), I opened Windows Explorer and went to the Zip drive, and found that the disk was filling up with images of women who had clearly gotten too warm, and decided to remove all their clothing.
Screenshots were duly taken (of filenames, not the images), and information sent to HR & Management, whereupon the user in question claimed that he was "copying it for a friend who didn't have internet access). Management then decided that even though there was a precedent of sacking people caught doing this kind of thing, that he merely merited a warning.
Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more
A great day for non-robots: iOS 16 will bypass CAPTCHAs
BOFH: Tech helps HR investigate the Boss's devices
Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada
Global pandemic was good for business, say UK infosec pros – but we're still burning out
Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively
Microsoft exposes glue-free guts of the Surface Laptop Studio
Netflix to crack down on account sharing, offer ad-laden cheaper options

So many things wrong with the TV/Streaming model
It's partly due to naff content, partly that I've seen pretty much everything I want to watch from them over the last two years, and partly that although I have access to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Sky Movies and Disney Plus, there are still things that I can't get.
I'm not going to get any more subscriptions, especially when things disappear from them and someone else gets to decide what I can and can't watch. Everyone has suddenly decided that they need their own streaming service, and you can only view their content on that. I've had enough of them all, I want one service with access to all of them, so I can pick and choose the few shows/films I want to see, and not pay for all the rest of the dross that I will never watch.
Also, while I'm on a rant, how do Sky get away with charging you for access to channels, and then forcing you to watch adverts. If I'm paying for a service, I expect to get it without adverts. And if you insist on having adverts, then why am I paying for it?
Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows
BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store
BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves
Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault
Boffins find way to use a standard smartphone to find hidden spy cams
Let us give thanks that this November, Microsoft has given us just 55 security fixes, two of which are for actively exploited flaws
Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call
Sharing is caring, except when it's your internet connection
Re: "What the neighbours made of their sudden disconnection is . ."
I've had that with a Powerline network. Was using it for a few months until one day everything seemed really slow, and I couldn't see my media server. so I went to the router, and found it was for Sky broadband, which surprised me as I was with BT at the time...
Google emits Chrome 94 with 'Idle Detection' API to detect user inactivity amid opposition
I would drive 100 miles and I would drive 100 more just to be the man that drove 200 miles to... hit the enter key
We've all done it
I've had a 390 mile round trip from Uxbridge to Newton Abbot and back in a day, just to press return on a server. Mainly because this server was locked in a secure room, and I wasn't allowed to tell anyone on site the code for the door (the two people who did know were off sick or on holiday in the USA), and my colleagues in Chester worked out that I was closest to Newton Abbot, but only by a few miles.
Electron-to-joule conversion formulae? Cute. Welcome to the school of hard knocks
Re: Ask the dog - it has an 80% success rate
I do that with crossword clues. The act of reading the clue out loud makes you hear it as well as read it, and a different part of the brain thinks about it and bam you have the answer, often before you've finished reading the clue out, which annoys/frustrates everyone who's listening.
Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you
A practical demonstration of the difference between 'resilient' and 'redundant'
Oh! A surprise tour of the data centre! You shouldn't have. No, you really shouldn't have
I got chewed out on a Friday morning once for not answering the on-call phone the previous evening.
It turned out that the pub I'd gone to do the quiz at was in a dead-spot for phone signal on the network that the on-call phone was using, so it never rang. I filed that information away for further use in case I didn't want to take a call again in future...
D'oh! Misplaced chair shuts down nuclear plant in Taiwan
What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell
Re: Dignity
I once interviewed for a lowly tech position at a financial company, and they made me go to Central London 5 times in total, getting through technical tests, interviews with various engineers, managers, and HR types, and on the last one spent two hours talking absolute nonsense about how great they were.
This was after 3 months of being out of work, so I put up with it, because I didn't feel like I had any other choice.
I had an interview for another company that afternoon. It lasted 45 minutes, and they called to offer me the job before I'd even got home...